Out of the comfort zone

Poonam Pattni is perched cross-legged on a bright pink, cube-shaped stool of stuffed vinyl-PVC that looks as though it might have been brought home in a Mini from a central London branch of Habitat, circa 1967 - long before she was born. Pattni has recently returned to Warwick University to complete the final year of her sociology degree, and she is telling those gathered in the university's Reinvention Centre about the six-week trip to Tanzania she made during the long vacation.

All she has to do now is write up her original research, financed with a £1,000 grant from the centre, into the uses made of school text books sent from the UK.

David Metcalfe, editor of a journal that publishes undergraduate research from Warwick and elsewhere, listens intently and offers encouragement. Metcalfe, a second-year medical student, is one of few people in the room sitting almost bolt upright, albeit on a dark blue cube. Others are semi-prone on giant yellow beanbags.

The furniture in here is designed to be easily moved about to create flexible spaces. Why? "Because spaces shape how we teach and learn," says sociology lecturer Dr Catherine Lambert. "A power dynamic is established in a conventional lecture hall. Here there is no place for the teacher and the taught. It's more collaborative, more risky. Students are at the limit of their comfort zone. They don't sit behind the barrier of a desk. They have to move around and take part."

The breaking down of barriers is symbolic of the philosophy behind the centre. This is a collaborative venture between academics and undergraduates. At school, students could thrive by passively absorbing information. And some of that passivity has seeped into a much-expanded higher education system in which students can all too easily see themselves as consumers rather than producers. "I'm paying a lot of money for this course, so tell me what I need to know to pass the exams," is the market-driven mantra that is being challenged here.

Warwick is not doing this alone. At least eight universities have developed centres for enquiry-based learning on a multi-disciplinary basis. Students are encouraged to be able to take a body of information and analyse it, to be innovative and critical - and to be prepared to share that information with other departments and, indeed, other universities at small-scale conferences. Instead of producing a long dissertation at the end of three years, undergraduates are expected to embark on original research much earlier.

But are they equipped to do that? "Not straight from day one," Lambert concedes. "We have to pass on the methods and provide a supportive research environment. This room is a complementary space to other, more conventional teaching environments. Here they can lay out their maps and charts, use the walls to project on to and take on ownership of the place. The lighting and acoustics are very sophisticated. There are wireless connections and the floor is an integral part of the set-up." The floor is made of rubber, with heating underneath. Students tend to sprawl across it, tapping away at their laptops or swapping ideas in informal discussion groups.

The centre was set up two years ago in a building that once housed a bar. Warwick had made a joint bid with its long-term collaborator Oxford Brookes for some of the £315m handed out by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) to 74 universities to set up centres for excellence in teaching, otherwise known as CETLs. Oxford Brookes has used its share to set up a cross between a library and a cafe where students are encouraged to work collaboratively. Other universities, notably Sussex, Manchester and Sheffield, have designed rooms with spaces similar to those at the Reinvention Centre.

There are times when Warwick's Reinvention Centre houses between 40 and 50 students. Departments as diverse as history of art and biology, English and chemistry make use of it. Its new director, Dr Paul Taylor, is a reader in chemistry. On this Monday lunchtime at the beginning of term, however, around a dozen undergraduates, mainly sociologists, are gathered to discuss their research projects - ongoing, completed or, in Pattni's case, just beginning. "I'm a bit nervous that this will eventually appear in a journal," she admits from her pink cubic perch. "But it's also quite exciting."

Lambert is, loosely, orchestrating today's meeting. To say that she's chairing it would suggest something altogether more formal. One of her first tasks today is to reveal that Professor Mike Neary, sociologist and founding director of the centre, has moved on. Some audible gasps greet this announcement. "He's gone to reinvent Lincoln," she goes on. By that she means that he has been appointed dean of teaching and learning at Lincoln University after being made a national teaching fellow for his work at Warwick.

"I'm helping to redesign this place to develop new methods of learning," Neary says over the phone from Lincoln. Part of his approach will be to enhance that university's growing reputation for involving itself with the community around it. When he was at Warwick, he saw the Reinvention Centre as a way of engaging more closely with Coventry. He set up a scheme with the local probation service that resulted in him spending Friday afternoons bringing 18-year-olds to a place where none had set foot before: a university campus. "The Reinvention Centre came as quite a surprise to them because it was nothing like what they had expected," he recalls. "It was a way of saying to them 'education is important'. There were 15 volunteers and they loved coming here." What about the undergraduates who met them? "They were studying the criminology course, so meeting lads on probation made it very real to them. They got on well."

Neary, 51, began his own undergraduate life at Leeds in 1974, six years after the events that he still regards as seminal in higher education - the worldwide movement of protest that erupted in 1968. "It was the beginning of the democratisation of the teaching and learning process: the idea that student and teacher could work together in a way that was participatory rather than hierarchic," he says.

The rash of books brought out to coincide with next year's 40th anniversary might as well be classified under ancient history for most of today's undergraduates. Like the Habitat-inspired furniture in the Reinvention Centre, those ground-breaking ideas emerged before they were born.